“Through incorporating principles of engineering, we’ve developed a language that can describe biology in the same way a biologist would,” says Gunawardena. “The potential here is enormous. This opens the door to actually performing discovery science, to look at things like drug interactions, right on the computer.”

20 May 2008—A group of mechanical engineers at Caltech have come up with a way to guide miniature robots in the task of inserting and positioning electrode arrays in brain tissue. What they propose would be the first robotic approach to establishing an interface between computers and the brain by positioning electrodes in neural tissue.